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June 16, 2006
TT: Where every prospect pleases
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday digging in the Garden of Satchmo, and came home bearing riches galore.On Tuesday I drove to the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, New Jersey, a city in which there appears to be no parking at all. In order to stow my Zipcar, I had to drive all the way up to the roof of a dinky little garage reachable only by ascending a corkscrew ramp located inside a silo. Once I finally got where I was going, though, Dan Morgenstern, a distinguished critic who knew Louis Armstrong when young and now runs the most important jazz library in the world in between writing thoughtful essays about the music he loves, filled my lap with goodies. Among them were the unedited typescript of Armstrong's autobiography and a thick stack of his letters--real letters, mind you, not photocopies.
Of course I'd seen original Armstrong manuscripts before, but I'd never handled one, much less a king-sized batch of Satch. I got so excited that I worked for six hours straight without bothering to eat lunch or check my messages. That was a medium-sized mistake, as I discovered when I returned home and learned that three editors from The Wall Street Journal had been trying to call me all day. By early evening they were on the verge of jumping to the not-unreasonable conclusion (given my recent medical history) that I'd dropped dead. One of them actually went so far as to call Our Girl in Chicago to find out what hospital I was in, which didn't do anything for her peace of mind.
On Wednesday I went back to the Louis Armstrong Archives to finish going through Armstrong's Thirties scrapbooks, after which I listened to a half-dozen of the private tape recordings he made after hours. As the Armstrong Archives Web site explains, "Louis Armstrong's personal tape collection comprises 650 reels of audiotape. When he was hanging out with fans backstage or with friends in a hotel room or with Lucille at home, he loved to set his tape deck to ‘record' and just let it roll." Most of the tapes are full of dross, but the good stuff is stupendously revealing, and I'll be the first Armstrong biographer to have had access to it. (You can listen to selected snippets by going here.) Needless to say, I spent the whole afternoon with my fingers flying and my mouth hanging open.
Today I slept late and met an art-collector friend for lunch, after which we went to an Upper East Side gallery to look at paintings. I walked home through Central Park, where I ran into a film crew shooting on Bow Bridge, surrounded by an ocean of slack-jawed gawkers who apparently had nothing better to do than stand around in the hopes of seeing a movie star or two. Muscling my way through the crowd, I fled to my favorite park bench, only to find it occupied by two noisy conversationalists. I returned to my apartment and curled up on the couch with Maurice Baring's C (yes, that's the name of it), an undeservedly forgotten novel from which I plan to draw most of next week's almanac entries. (If you don't know who Maurice Baring is, go here and let Joseph Epstein fill you in.)
And so to bed. I'm not quite over my cold, but another good night's sleep should take care of it. On Saturday night I'll be seeing King Lear with an artist friend whom I adore, and at some point I'll start writing the sixth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I'll be out of town all next week, but I plan to do a modest amount of blogging from my secure undisclosed location somewhere in deepest Connecticut.
Life is still good--and no, I'm not dead yet.
Posted June 16, 2006 12:00 PM
